Reasoning is a lost skill of the children of the TV generation, with their famously short attention span. Writing can help them get it back. - William Zinsser

I don’t know what still newer marvels will make writing twice as easy in the next 30 years. But I do know they won’t make writing twice as good. That will still require plain old hard thinking — what E. B. White was doing in his boathouse — and the plain old tools of the English language.

had learned by long travail a far from obvious lesson: Readers must be given room to bring their own emotions to a piece so crammed with emotional content; the writer must tenaciously resist explaining why the material is so moving.)

Rewriting is the essence of writing well: it’s where the game is won or lost. That idea is hard to accept. We all have an emotional equity in our first draft; we can’t believe that it wasn’t born perfect. But the odds are close to 100 percent that it wasn’t. Most writers don’t initially say what they want to say, or say it as well as they could.